If you have a lot of free time and got any passion for creating art, I'd suggest investing it into learning to either draw/paint or learning 3D. It will take years to get good at either, but you'll have the satisfaction of being able to produce content exactly the way you envisioned it, without all of the limitations that come from using pre-made assets with limited control over their customization. My recommendations on software are
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for drawing/painting and
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for 3D, in both cases I would pick up a decent medium sized graphics tablet as that will be one of the single greatest investments you can put into improving your skills with either. It's pretty much mandatory for digital painting, on the 3D side I couldn't even dream of ever wanting to go back to sculpting with a mouse again after I got into using my tablet. Huion has some of the nicest and most affordable tablets these days. I'm using a rebranded UC-Logic tablet I picked up from Monoprice several years back that I really enjoy.
If art isn't your thing and you have a mind geared towards logical and analytical thinking, maybe consider learning to program. Python is a great starter language, and it's the basis for engines like
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if you ever wanted to get into that and do anything more advanced with it than the base tool set provides.
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has quickly become my favorite game engine and that uses a Python like language as it's default (GDScript), though you can also code directly in C++ or import modules to offer support for C# and a few others.
Other than those, there's also story writing. The best way to get better at that is to read a ton, find fiction that fits your tastes and consume as much of it as you can. Also, something I've been doing for a while now is compiling my own dictionary. I use a
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notebook where I compile all my notes related to fiction and in it I have a page for my personal dictionary. Every time I come across a word I'm unsure about or really like the sound of in books I'm reading, I look it up online and then hand type out the word and definition into my dictionary page to help cement the word in my memory. I also include the sentence it was used in along with a citation to the work it was found in. I'll go into it from time to time to review to help make it stick.
Another useful writing practice is to do something of a dream journal, I can't tell you how many dreams have inspired story or scene ideas for me. They usually get changed up quite a bit, but it's still a valuable source of inspiration you can draw from. Also consider making it a point to critique all the fiction you take in. Take notes on what you liked and disliked about the books, movies, games, comics, etc you go through. This can help a lot with kick starting your brain on ideas to develop. You can borrow elements you liked from multiple sources and find a way to uniquely blend them into something new, while avoiding the pitfalls you might've found in the original sources.
A handy tool for laying out a branching narrative is
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. It has a very nice flowchart style story editor where you add a node for each chunk of story you want to include, adding new nodes is as simple as adding a link within the text of an existing node formatted as follows: [[Text to display.->Scene name to link to]] With just that you can map out a text demo of your game ideas in an easy to visualize format that you can either release as is with it's html exports or transfer the text to your engine of choice later on.
